Matchmake the traditional way, but with an app: Spouseup mixes old with the new

Marriages are made in heaven but the matchmaking happens in your relative’s house. In the good old days, family and friends took the responsibility of matchmaking. However, with the advent of matrimonial sites they took a back seat and let technology do the work. But now Spouseup, a matrimonial platform, is mixing the old with the new. To make sure your friends and family are involved in the process, Spouseup helps users with recommendations. The first few recommendations which a user gets are often from his inner circle, just like recommendations from relatives and friends.

The app connects to Facebook to look for mutual interests and then gives recommendations based on them.

How it works

Spouseup works in two ways to find a suitable match. In the first option, the single can log into the site or the Android app, and the app will display specific matches based on her interests. The user can also search based on location, age, religion, caste and other traditional parameters. The second way is where her friends and parents can log into Spouseup and play the role of a matchmaker and introduce their friends or friends of friends as a potential candidate.

To search for a relevant match, Spouseup uses your Facebook likes and interests to build a highly focused match database for you using its algorithms. The first options come from the friends and friends of friends in your circle in order to bring in the trust factor. To minimize the risk of fraud, Spouseup allows friends and relatives to write recommendation for you. A matchmaker can also introduce mutual friends and suggest new people who might fit your profile. Once two people are connected they can chat and get to know each other eventually from within the platform.

Talking about why they started Spouseup, Karthik says, "The relationship market has been static for many years and there has been very little innovation or disruption. We realized that the new-age Indians of the internet era are far more complex as they read, travel and explore a lot, as a result relying on traditional approaches such as caste and religion alone for matchmaking does not provide useful results. Spouseup was designed to use traditional methods such as caste and religion but also modern methods such as Facebook interest match and using intelligent algorithms to sort and list matches."

Karthik says it is not a platform for relationships and dating, and this is their main USP.

"We are focused on matrimonials. We employ big data tech to understand our users and allow our intelligent algorithms to find matches, but we also allow our users to get into the manual mode and search based on traditional parameters such as age, and caste etc. We are also unique as your friends can write references in the profile and priority is given to finding matches within your extended friends and friend of friends’ network (and if that fails the system matches you to others whom you are not connected to in the Spouseup universe)," says Karthik.

"YourStory and Progate are hosting a developer meetup on 'Building Scalable Technologies', on Saturday, February 24 in Bengaluru.
Register now for the meetup if you’re building something interesting, looking to learn about new technologies or want to hear from those who’ve been there and done that. Limited seats available. Register now!

"YourStory and Progate are hosting a developer meetup on 'Building Scalable Technologies', on Saturday, February 24 in Bengaluru.
Register now for the meetup if you’re building something interesting, looking to learn about new technologies or want to hear from those who’ve been there and done that. Limited seats available. Register now!